Fireflies (23 page)

Those mountains called to us. In April, on my forty-ninth birthday (which, symbolically, I thought of as my fiftieth), we spent a long weekend there. We found ourselves so captivated by the area’s mixture of Hispanic, Native American, and Anglo cultures that four months later, in the most impulsive decision of our lives, Donna and I moved to Santa Fe, where, as Donna described it, we began Act Three. In an amazing spiritual setting (the northern New Mexico light has long been a favorite of painters), we learned to look inward and outward while, equally important, living now. Matt is still with us. Literally. Just before leaving Iowa City, we went to the mausoleum, asked the superintendent to unscrew the glass plates that sealed Matthew’s urn in its niche (the memory of the dove was certainly with me that day), and drove home with the urn in Donna’s arms. He and three cats made the thousand-mile car trip with us. He’s on a book-shelf in a small office off the living room. Sometimes, sentimentally, I put on a Jimi Hendrix CD for him. But it’s a good kind of sentiment, not a looking back but an accepting—just as I look fondly and not painfully at the beautiful white acoustic-electric guitar we gave him shortly before he died and that he was never able to play. It’s in a corner of the TV room. I often put my hand on it as I go past, just as I touch Matt’s urn when I’m near it in the office. Having made peace with Matt’s death, feeling him with us, Donna and I move on.

There’s a lot to move toward. After working as a book publicist, Sarie eventually married. She has a daughter, age four—which, in case you miss the point, means that we’re grandparents. What a delightful child Natalie is. (But then that’s one of the themes of this book—
all
children are delightful; adults sometimes need to be reminded of that.) How I worry that something might happen to her. But that’s out of my control, just as Matthew’s cancer was. Everything’s an act of faith. We have to accept what is the case. Take the bad with the good, load it all aboard, and do our damnedest to move on. A hard lesson. But I’ve had a lot of years to learn it, and I learn it anew with each passing day.

Look homeward, angel.

January 1999

David Morrell is the award-winning author of
First Blood
, the novel in which Rambo was created. He was born in 1943 in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. In 1960, at the age of seventeen, he became a fan of the classic television series,
Route 66
, about two young men in a Corvette convertible traveling the United States in search of America and themselves. The scripts by Stirling Silliphant so impressed Morrell that he decided to become a writer.

In 1966, the work of another writer (Hemingway scholar Philip Young) prompted Morrell to move to the United States, where he studied with Young at the Pennsylvania State University and received his M.A. and Ph. D. in American literature. There, he also met the esteemed science-fiction writer William Tenn (real name Philip Klass), who taught Morrell the basics of fiction writing. The result was
First Blood
, a ground-breaking novel about a returned Vietnam veteran suffering from post-trauma stress disorder who comes into conflict with a small-town police chief and fights his own version of the Vietnam War.

That “father” of modern action novels was published in 1972 while Morrell was a professor in the English department at the University of Iowa. He taught there from 1970 to 1986, simultaneously writing other novels, many of them international bestsellers, including the classic spy trilogy,
The Brotherhood of the Rose
(the basis for a top-rated NBC miniseries broadcast after the Super Bowl),
The Fraternity of the Stone
, and
The League of Night and Fog
.

Eventually wearying of two professions, Morrell gave up his academic tenure in order to write full time. Shortly afterward, his fifteen-year-old son Matthew was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer and died in 1987, a loss that haunts not only Morrell’s life but his work, as in his memoir about Matthew,
Fireflies
, and his novel
Desperate Measures
, whose main character lost a son.

“The mild-mannered professor with the bloody-minded visions,” as one reviewer called him, Morrell is the author of thirty-two books, including such high-action thrillers as
Creepers
,
Scavenger
, and
The Spy Who Came for Christmas
(set in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lives). Always interested in different ways to tell a story, he wrote the six-part comic-book series,
Captain America: The Chosen
. His writing book,
The Successful Novelist
, analyzes what he has learned during his almost four decades as an author.

Morrell is a co-founder of the International Thriller Writers organization. Noted for his research, he is a graduate of the National Outdoor Leadership School for wilderness survival as well as the G. Gordon Liddy Academy of Corporate Security. He is also an honorary lifetime member of the Special Operations Association and the Association of Intelligence Officers. He has been trained in firearms, hostage negotiation, assuming identities, executive protection, and defensive/offensive driving, among numerous other action skills that he describes in his novels. To research the aerial sequences in his latest novel,
The Shimmer
, he became a private pilot.

Morrell is a three-time recipient of the distinguished Bram Stoker Award, the latest for his novel
Creepers.
The International Thriller Writers organization gave him its prestigious Thriller Master Award. With eighteen million copies of his work in print, his work has been translated into twenty-six languages.